Read the full story in Fast Company.
The Sony MDZRX110 headphones are nothing special. They’re your typical, bulky, black, plastic headphones. They retail for $15 on Amazon. But when nearly 200 people listened to the same clips of music on these headphones, scientists discovered something interesting: Half the people liked the music just fine, and half the people liked it more than fine—or even a lot.
Why did the music sound better to some people? Because they were told that their headphones were made from recycled plastic. That blatant lie literally changed the way people perceived music.
As it turns out, when people think a product is green, they’re not just more likely to buy it; they actually enjoy the experience of that product more than they would if the product were not green.
These findings—dubbed the “greenconsumption effect”—come out of a new paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research, from the John Molson School of Business in Concordia.
